Abbas recently finished his first year of beginning Mandarin. "Chinese is the language that can make Pakistan prosperous and help Pakistanis get a job," he says. "China can also help Pakistan move forward."

Zhou Xu is a volunteer teacher at a Mandarin class at the National University of Modern Languages in Islamabad. About 500 students are taking Mandarin, and the school has added morning and evening classes.

Abbas looks at books in the library at the National University of Modern Languages. Much of the rush to learn Mandarin began after Beijing and Islamabad signed a memorandum of understanding that launched the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor in 2015.

Saiyna Bashir for NPR

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Originally published on October 10, 2018 2:33 pm

Saleem Abbas is the kind of student who sits in the front row. He's the first to try to answer a question. He eagerly repeats the Mandarin expressions that his teacher throws at the class: "Is this your family or not?" he repeats after the teacher. Then: "I have a mother."

These lessons mean a lot to Abbas, a 17-year-old from a village deep in the Pakistani Himalayas. His father is a retired soldier, and his pension isn't enough to go around. Abbas, one of five siblings, lives with his uncle in a gritty town outside Islamabad, in a room that only contains a thin mattress, where he sleeps and studies. He calls his mother once a month — there's no Internet back home.

"Every month, I ask my mother about her health," he says in broken English. "She cries, but I don't cry."

His family has staked what little money they have on him. If he masters Mandarin, he can apply for a scholarship to study in China. And with a Chinese degree, he thinks he'll have a chance of getting a good job back in Pakistan as a fluent Mandarin speaker. Then he can pay for his younger brothers and sisters to get advanced educations.

In Pakistan, speaking Mandarin is now seen as a door to prosperity.

"Chinese is the language that can make Pakistan prosperous and help Pakistanis get a job," he says. "China can also help Pakistan move forward."

Abbas, who just finished his first year of beginning Mandarin at Islamabad's National University of Modern Languages, is part of a rush to master Mandarin across Pakistan. At least three prominent universities and three private school networks offer the language to hundreds of students. Much of this began in the past few years, after Beijing and Islamabad signed a memorandum of understanding that launched the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor in 2015. It is an ambitious series of infrastructure projects worth more than $50 billion.

The mix of investment, loans and Chinese expertise is transforming Pakistan with new roads, metros, a port and power plants. Tens of thousands of Chinese have come to work on these projects. Officials say there's a demand for translators, lawyers and supervisors. But they need to speak Mandarin.

This reflects a profound transformation of Pakistan's relationship with China. The relationship goes back nearly seven decades, and for much of that time, it has been a high-level affair, controlled by military and senior government officials. The relationship centered on security and a loathing of their mutual neighbor, India. It is now also becoming a relationship among people.

"I think you start to have something that is a more sort of sustainable cultural basis for the relationship," says Andrew Small, the senior transatlantic fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States and author of The China-Pakistan Axis: Asia's New Geopolitics. "It's just been so thin in the past. I think it will be interesting to see to what extent the kind of long-term national outlook does actually change."

At the university where Abbas studies, senior Mandarin lecturer Rashida Mustafa says Mandarin has been taught since the early 1970s. For most of that time, there were 20 students per class and three classes — two for beginners and one advanced. Most of the students were military officers, Mustafa says.

Now, there are 500 students studying Mandarin, and the university added morning and evening classes. From 10 teachers in 2014, they now have 40, alongside two volunteer teachers that the Chinese Embassy provides.

"This demand is becoming bigger and bigger," says Lijian Zhao, the embassy's deputy chief of mission. "From [the] embassy, we have a lot of requests. Many serious universities — they would like to open up Chinese classes and they need Chinese volunteers."

But they don't have enough teachers, Zhao says. To deal with this, the Chinese government and Chinese universities offered some 5,000 scholarships to Pakistanis in 2016, he says — more than to students from any other country.

China's hope is that some of the scholarship recipients will return home to teach Mandarin and create a sustainable Pakistani network for teaching the language.

Even without scholarships, it seems Pakistanis are flocking to study in China. In 2016, some 22,000 were studying there, Zhao says — a "more than 10 times increase" over the past six years. Now, he says, Pakistanis rank as the fourth-largest group of foreign students in China, after South Koreans, Americans and Thais.

Still, efforts to teach Mandarin in Pakistan are fragile. Mustafa says most students drop out because they are shocked by how difficult it is.

"When they start," she says, "maybe after two weeks, they say, 'Oh, Ma'am, it's very difficult, character writing is very difficult.' "

Mandarin still falls far behind English, the language overwhelmingly spoken by educated Pakistanis. Elites still send their children to universities in the West.

And familiarity does not always build rapport.

It is rare to see Chinese and Pakistanis mingling — there are cultural and language gaps, and security restrictions limit the movement of Chinese nationals.

Sometimes there are outright clashes. In April, Chinese workers on a CPEC project brawled with Pakistani police guarding their compound and stomped on their vehicle. Local media reported that the workers wanted to go to a nearby red-light district but were denied permission to leave their camp without being accompanied by security officials. (It wasn't clear whether the security officials were also preventing them from visiting a red-light area.)

The incident, partly caught on video, unleashed rare criticism about Pakistan's relations with China. Many Pakistanis see their country as subservient.

"Chinese consider Pakistan and Pakistani people under their thumbs," a reader wrote in response to a Pakistani newspaper story about the incident. That attitude is, in part, because Pakistani officials have kept many financial details of the CPEC projects secret.

Closeness, says Small, "exposes China to more dynamics of public opinion and political pressures that it was really very insulated from in the past."

Zhang Daojian, the director of Islamabad's Chinese-run Confucius Institute, which teaches Mandarin to 400 students, says the institute is trying to teach Pakistani students about Chinese culture, hoping to bridge these gaps. His students celebrate Chinese traditions like the Spring Festival or Chinese New Year.

Religion is a big sticking point. Daojian says Chinese struggle to understand Islam's outsize role in Pakistan. And Pakistanis struggle to absorb the notion that China does not have a state religion.

"This is the big difference, of course, in our culture, in Chinese culture, there is no God and no Allah," Daojian says. "No one created the universe, it's very difficult for us to understand the religion here."

Meanwhile, China's massive infrastructure projects are controversial within Pakistan. Many of the agreements regulating CPEC projects are secret. There is concern among some Pakistanis that CPEC, much like China's investments in other developing countries, will lead to unsustainable debt and may erode the country's sovereignty.

Despite those issues, there is enthusiasm about China. It's a rare gateway open to Pakistanis who often struggle to obtain visas to the West. Unlike the expensive fees and financial demands on Pakistanis who want, for example, to study in Australia or the U.K., China's universities are relatively more affordable and scholarships are generously available. Pakistanis also say it's easier to obtain visas to China than to those other countries.

There's a striking sense that China is cool. That's mostly because enough Pakistanis have gone there and spread the word back home.

"I like China! I want to visit China," a 21-year-old woman in Islamabad named Anam says in English. "I have friends there, and they say it's an awesome place to live, so I want to visit China once in my life."

Anam wears a long black robe, a black hijab and a black veil that obscures her face. She would stick out in China. It doesn't faze her.

In a few cases, there has been enough mixing to create lasting personal relationships. Zunaira Mumtaz is Pakistani, and her husband, Yin Hang, is Chinese. They've been married four years and have a daughter, now a toddler. They joke that she's a hybrid. Her mother calls the girl by her Pakistani name, Umul-Baneen. Her father calls her by her Chinese name, Eefay. The couple communicates in English.

Mumtaz met Yin on Valentine's Day in 2011. Mumtaz was at an Islamabad hotel for a free acupuncture session. Yin was there translating for the Chinese businesswoman offering the acupuncture.

"I saw him there for the first time," Mumtaz says.

"I remember she smiled," Yin recalls, "smiling to me."

After Yin left Pakistan, they connected over social media. A few months later, he flew to Pakistan to propose.

These sorts of relationships so were so unheard of in Pakistan that Mumtaz's father initially refused to give his blessings. It took him four years to approve their union.

Yin says it was worth it.

"Before marriage, I felt something missing," he said. Once he got married, "I got all I want."

Mumtaz says she has noticed more mixed couples popping up across Pakistan. She believes that is because of CPEC.

"You see when people are making a road," she says, referring to the massive road works projects, "it's kind of opening to a new world."

But the path isn't painless. Mumtaz struggles to learn Mandarin. Without the language, she says, fitting in will be difficult for her in China. And her husband, she says, doesn't think Pakistan is safe for their daughter. They hope to emigrate — maybe to Canada.

Their experience sketches out something broader. China's presence is changing Pakistan. But linking two cultures, bringing people closer, may not be as easy as just learning a language.

Copyright 2018 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:

And we are continuing our series on China's influence around the world. Today we visit an old ally of China's, Pakistan. For seven decades, they've had a close relationship, but it's been formal between politicians and generals. Now that relationship is changing and fast. NPR's Diaa Hadid reports from Islamabad.

DIAA HADID, BYLINE: Saleem Abbas sits in a Mandarin class at a university in Islamabad. He's 17, has big, brown eyes and sits at front of the class.

NAYYAR NAWAZ: (Speaking Mandarin).

UNIDENTIFIED STUDENTS: (Speaking Mandarin).

NAWAZ: (Speaking Mandarin).

UNIDENTIFIED STUDENTS: (Speaking Mandarin).

NAWAZ: (Speaking Mandarin).

UNIDENTIFIED STUDENTS: (Speaking Mandarin).

NAWAZ: (Speaking Mandarin).

UNIDENTIFIED STUDENTS: (Speaking Mandarin).

NAWAZ: (Speaking Mandarin).

HADID: Abbas comes from a village deep in the Pakistani Himalayas, a two day bus ride from Islamabad. He came here to study Mandarin. He says he wants to pull his whole family out of poverty.

SALEEM ABBAS: (Through interpreter) I'm learning Chinese so that I could get a job, helping my brothers and sister to get education.

HADID: Abbas sacrifices a lot to be here. He only gets to call his mother once a month. There's no Internet back home, no FaceTime. He tells me in broken English.

ABBAS: Every month, I call my mother, and I ask her what her about her health. She's crying, but I don't cry.

HADID: Abbas lives in his uncle's house near a busy road. His room just has a thin mattress. It's his bed and where he studies. He uses an app that helps him pronounce Mandarin.

ABBAS: (Speaking Mandarin).

COMPUTER-GENERATED VOICE: (Speaking Mandarin).

ABBAS: (Speaking Mandarin).

COMPUTER-GENERATED VOICE: (Speaking Mandarin).

HADID: Abbas is part of this rush across Pakistan to master Mandarin. Consider the institution where he studies. There were a handful of Pakistanis studying Mandarin all the way from the '70s until 2014 according to senior lecturer Rashida Mustafa.

RASHIDA MUSTAFA: Before 2014, we have 20 each class.

HADID: How many students are there today?

MUSTAFA: We have 500 students.

HADID: How many teachers are there?

MUSTAFA: Before 2014, we have 10 teachers. Now we have 40 teachers.

HADID: Mustafa says students aren't prepared for how hard it is to learn the language.

MUSTAFA: They don't know what is the Chinese language and how difficult is this language. When they start, maybe after two weeks, they say, oh, ma'am, it's very difficult. Character writing is very difficult. Why Chinese are not trying to change their script?

HADID: But the demand for Chinese speakers is real and started after China began investing tens of billions of dollars into roads, metros, a port and power plants. It's called the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, CPEC, and it's part of China's ambitious Belt and Road Initiative. Tens of thousands of Chinese have come here to work on these projects, but they need translators, lawyers, supervisors. It's employment for Pakistanis in the country's weak economy. But they'll need to speak Mandarin, and the Chinese government can't keep up with the demand for teachers. Lijian Zhao is the deputy chief of mission at the Chinese embassy in Islamabad.

LIJIAN ZHAO: From the embassy, we have a lot of requests. Many serious universities - they would like to open up Chinese classes, and they need Chinese volunteers. But we could not find the adequate number of Chinese teachers for them, so this is a big problem for us.

HADID: Zhao says China is offering thousands of scholarships in the hope that some of those Pakistani students will become Mandarin teachers. Right now he says there's about 22,000 Pakistanis studying in China, the fourth largest body of foreign students in the country. One of those Pakistanis who wants to study in China is Anam. She only gives me her first name. She wears a long, black robe, a black headscarf and a black face veil. She jokes about how nobody can tell her age.

ANAM: Don't I look like I'm 21 (laughter)?

HADID: She's currently studying physiotherapy.

ANAM: And probably for my high studies, I may go to China.

HADID: Do you think it opens job opportunities if you study Chinese?

ANAM: I think so because as I'm studying physiotherapy - and if I go for a specialized field like sports and physiotherapist - so they'll invest in that so I can go there for my high studies.

HADID: She says even if she doesn't study there, she hopes she can visit someday. And that reflects something else happening in Pakistan - this new sense that China's cool. It signals a profound transformation in Pakistan's relationship with China. For decades, it was centered around security and a shared distrust of their neighbor India. Now it's slowly becoming a relationship between people, and that might make this old relationship even stronger. Andrew Small is the author of the book "The China-Pakistan Axis."

ANDREW SMALL: I think you start to have something that is actually a more sort of sustainable cultural basis for the relationship than you've had before it. It's just being so thin in the past. I think it will be interesting to see to what extent the kind of long-term national outlook does actually change.

HADID: And this changing relationship between the two countries has led to long-term relationships of another kind.

ZUNAIRA MUMTAZ: (Foreign language spoken).

HADID: I meet Zunaira at her parents' house. She's Pakistani. Her husband, Yin Hang, is Chinese. They've been married for four years and have a toddler. They call her a hybrid.

MUMTAZ: Her name is Umul-Baneen. That's her Pakistani name. Her Chinese name - father can tell.

HADID: Zunaira and Yin Hang met on Valentine's Day. He was at a hotel, translating for a woman offering acupuncture, and she was there to get a free session.

MUMTAZ: So I saw him there for the first time.

YIN: I remember she smiled, smiling to me.

HADID: These kinds of matchups were unheard of in Pakistan before CPEC, before this massive influx of Chinese money and industry. In fact, their relationship was so new that her father initially refused to give his blessings. It took him four years to approve their union. Yin Hang says it was worth it.

YIN: Before getting married, always feeling that something missing. But once get married, I got all I want.

HADID: But the couple's own experience suggests that things aren't so easy. Yin Hang doesn't think Pakistan is safe for their daughter, but Zunaira feels like an outsider in China. They hope to emigrate, maybe to Canada. Even as they try to figure out their own situation, Zunaira says China is transforming Pakistan. And it's transforming relationships at the same time no matter how fragile and difficult they are. She says, look at the enormous highways China is building through Pakistan.

MUMTAZ: When people are making roads, it's not just a road. It's kind of an opening to a new world.